


What Lies Beyond Words

by Tcharlatan



Category: Dir en grey
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Comfort/Angst, Gen, Light Angst, POV First Person, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 09:16:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tcharlatan/pseuds/Tcharlatan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaoru needs to talk to Kyo, but Kyo can't speak while recovering from his throat surgery. As a result, an awful lot goes unsaid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Lies Beyond Words

Kyo’s words are black and white photographs of his world.

They’re clear – perfectly, sometimes horribly clear – and every important detail is captured in deadly sharp focus. Proportions and lighting are carefully, deliberately skewed with a mad genius’s eye for drama while never quite diminishing the striking reality of the image. But while the line between honesty and openness can be quite fine, he has spent his life very much on one side of it. His secrets, his intentions, his past and his passion and his prophecies all remain obscured in the monochromatic tones of the photos, leaving the truth of the color open to interpretation. It is this veracious abstraction that has always allowed him to reach out and touch the very hearts of people without giving all of himself away, though he’s cut it close more times than I can count.

Now he’s been silenced, possibly for good, and it seems like he’s trying to reverse the process; to create pictures that can express the words he wants. The table is completely covered in actual black and white photographs, only leaving room for the large notepad he’s so carefully drawing in. It’s kind of strange to see; he’s never really been one for drawing. But it’s Kyo, and if there’s one thing I know about Kyo, it’s that sixteen years is nowhere near enough time to stop being constantly surprised by him.

“So… do you want to talk?”

Sixteen years _is_ , however, more than enough time to become familiar with his _‘I’m sorry, did you fall down a flight of stairs or something? Because I swear you never used to be this stupid'_ face.

“Right, right. Sorry.”

He huffs a bit through his nose and goes back to his picture.

I watch him for a minute more before sitting back in my chair and scratching my chin. “You were sixteen when you dropped out of school, weren’t you? To try to get into music? That’s when it all started.”

He nods a little.

“And then you were twenty-six when your ear got blown out.”

He glances up at me.

“And now you’re thirty-six, and your throat’s fucked up.”

He gives me a _‘Yeah, I’m aware of my own life story, thanks. Get to the fucking point’_ look.

“So from this pattern, I can only assume that the next ten years are only going to be even better than the last, and then you’re going to fall off a stage and break your neck or something?”

A sudden wry grin spreads across his face and he ducks his head. He turns to one side to dig in his bag for a smaller notebook, then scribbles something in it and shoves it across the table to me.

­ **-Don’t make me laugh, asshole.-**

I chuckle a bit and push it back to him. “You know… I remember the night your ear got hurt.”

A less pleasant twist of his mouth tells me he does too.

“Everyone was freaking out. Totchi was crying all over the place. Hysterical, almost,” I muse, remembering our bassist reduced to a sobbing, melted heap of make-up. The others were worried sick as well, but Toshiya has always been particularly sensitive. “Not me, of course, I’m too macho for that kind of thing.”

I flex a little and he quirks another grin because he knows I’m lying out of my ass.

“And I came back alone to see you the next day, and you were crying, and it scared the piss out of me because Kyo Nishimura doesn’t _cry_. So I hugged you, and I cried a little, because, you know, I didn’t want you to feel awkward, being the only man in the room crying.”

The notepad comes back again. ­ **–You’re full of shit.-**

“Don’t interrupt, I’m telling a story!”

He rolls his eyes.

“Anyway, you were freaking out because you thought you’d never get to make music again. What the fuck kind of vocalist could you be, half-deaf? You thought it was going to be the end of everything; your career, Dir en grey, all of it. And I knew what it would have done to you. How devastated you would have been. So I said something awesome like ‘As long as you give it everything you’ve got, we’ll pull the music up right alongside you, and your voice will drive right through to people’s souls.’ And you did. Holy shit, did you. And I was right, wasn’t I? You can just scream your lungs out and the whole audience will actually _ripple_. I feel like that was the moment you went from being the Warumono to being the Prophet.”

He gives me an awkward smile and scratches his ear. He’s always been terrible at accepting praise.

“And now this… I worry that it’s my fault. I’m supposed to be the shepherd of this little flock of black sheep, and I just strapped wax wings onto you and sent you straight into the sun.”

**-One metaphor per story, please?-**

“Oh shut up, like you can talk.”

He gives me a nasty look and I realize what I just said.

I scratch the back of my neck and look away. “You know what I mean.”

The notepad hits the side of my head.

**-Ass.-**

“Fair enough.”

It’s quiet again. He seems like he’s having trouble with his picture now. Maybe because I’ve brought up bad memories, maybe he didn’t really want to have this talk – with me, or at all – maybe he’s just trying to think of what he wants to do with it artistically. Maybe he’s trying to figure out what the point of this conversation even is. If he figures it out, I hope he tells me, because I honestly don’t know. I just felt like I needed to talk to him. I straighten out the photographs one by one as I look them over. Simple things. Transient things. Old, worn, and dirty things. It’s an odd collection, and it seems to suit him well enough, but the images seem… flat compared to the ones he makes when he sings.

“…I tried to see if I couldn’t do some kind of solo project. People keep telling me I should, and since we’re taking a little break anyway, I just thought… you know.”

He looks a little strained, but shrugs, forcing nonchalance.

“I couldn’t do it,” I admit. “I mean, what the fuck would I even do? When I write, I write for _you_.”

His head comes up fast at that, looking a little shocked, and I realize how it sounds.

“I mean, you _guys_ , all of you,” I amend too quickly, “The whole… the whole band. It’s just that after everything we’ve been through… I can’t do it. I wake up thinking about Dir en grey, spend the day thinking about it, go to sleep thinking about it. _Dream_ about it, sometimes. And it’s not like I’ve ever been restricted or constrained in any way, there’s never been something I wanted to do but felt I couldn’t. I don’t want anything else. I never have.”

Several minutes go by before I add, in what I hope is a casual voice, “I know they always say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ but I think they might be talking about regular people’s words. Not yours. A thousand words… that’s what, five songs? Six? There’s no way any one picture could ever say all of that.”

He’s not drawing at all anymore. Just watching me. He doesn’t do that very often anymore; that intense, soul-reading stare. Not with us or other people. I forgot what it was like. After a while, he starts writing again in his notepad, and this time, when he passes it to me, his handwriting is deliberately clear.

**-Kaoru, I don’t know if I’m going to recover from this. The doctors have done their best, and I will do my best to heal, but we have to accept the fact that there is a chance that I will never sing again.-**

It hurts. Gods, it hurts to see that. I know he’s right, of course he’s right! He’s always right. But I don’t want him to be, this time. I want there to be something more we can do for him; something to ensure that he’ll get better and everything will go back to the way it was. I can’t imagine things ending this way. _Him_ ending this way. _Us_ ending this way. My chest hurts and I fold in on it, staring at his photographs, his drawing. The things he’s trying to replace his words with. I hear his chair creak and slide across the floor, hear him walking, see his legs coming up next to the side of my chair. He picks up his notepad, and I hear graphite scratch against paper, then it lands in front of me again. His arms wrap around my shoulders, holding me in a way I feel like _I_ should be holding _him_ right now, the way I held him once before that somehow gave him the strength to face this new trial, ten years later.

**-I’m not afraid. As long as I give it everything I have, I’ll find a way to reach people’s souls.-**

The photograph in my head is in black and white, and it’s too beautiful and horrible for words to describe.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> For the Kyo's Birthday Contest 2013. Read some interviews, started writing, deleted and rewrote about fifteen times, and this is where I ended up. Not really sure how, or what it's worth... but there it is. And yeah, I totally fudged the shit out of some dates in there for the sake of the story. Or Kaoru did. We'll say Kaoru did.


End file.
